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LSST E-News

LSST E-News

April 2009  •  Volume 2 Number 1  •  Archive

Welcome to the April 2009 issue of LSST E-News, marking our second year of publication. We take you from Tucson, AZ to Washington, DC then Canton, NY and Long Beach and Davis, CA. Enjoy the ride and thank you for your continued interest and support. On behalf of LSST, Suzanne Jacoby

LSST Donor Charles Simonyi Returns to Space

Follow his progress at www.charlesinspace.com


Project Manager’s Reflections

Don Sweeney

LSST M2 Mirror Fused

Don Sweeney, LSST Project Manager

As I prepare for the April face to face meeting of the LSST Board, it occurs to me how much the project has grown since I became manager six year ago. At that time, there were only four member organizations. Our Board meetings fit into the smallest of conference rooms. Today there are 28 members and Board meetings require careful advance planning. When I first started work in Tucson I had to move around from office to office before I found a permanent home. We had no NSF or DOE funding for design and development. Thankfully Research Corporation (now Research Corporation for Science Advancement) provided that initial seed funding to get us going. Today the LSST Corporation (LSSTC) budget is over $10M/year in design and development as we get ready for construction. We also spend millions more in long-lead items such as the telescope mirrors. The mirror funding is made possible by generous private support that seemed unattainable six years ago. The ten LSST science collaborations have just under 250 members and the technical engineering teams number about 100 staff members. Read More

LSST Secondary Mirror Substrate Fused

Bill Gressler

LSST M2 Mirror Fused

Technician Brian Todd unveils the LSST secondary (M2) mirror substrate

Progress continues on fabrication of the LSST Secondary Mirror (M2) Substrate at Corning’s Canton, New York facility. Corning machined eight boules of ULE®, selected for coefficient of thermal expansion homogeneity and quality, into petal shapes and positioned in an annular arrangement inside Corning’s 8-meter furnace. The furnace’s burners ignited on March 9, 2009 starting off a gradual ramping of glass temperature to reach high temperature fusion seal firing (1800°C) on March 13th. At high temperature, the separate petal pieces fused together to create a contiguous substrate. The temperature was then stabilized around the annealing temperature (1000°C) before the controlled cool down cycle, which ended on March 15th. Read More

LSST Goes to Long Beach

Suzanne Jacoby and Suzanne Nichols

LSST AAS Booth

The LSST Booth at the January 2009 AAS meeting in Long Beach

LSST had a strong showing at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which took place January 4-8 in Long Beach, California. Nearly 2500 astronomers were in attendance presenting 1800 scientific papers; the pressroom was active with more than a dozen press conferences and the exhibit floor crowded with 60 booths encouraging interaction. LSST had a large display on the exhibit floor featuring a 8' by 10' image of the team around the mirror blank, a video of project highlights, and an impromptu T-shirt raffle. Originally put up to conceal the back of our display, the T-shirts were so popular we raffled them off at the meeting’s conclusion. Read More

LSST Meets Washington Elite

Chuck Claver and Anna Spitz

cnsf1

Nancy Pelosi addresses the Coalition for National Science Funding

LSST was sponsored by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to participate in the 15th Annual Exhibition of the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF) on Capitol Hill. The evening event, The Path to Innovation: Scientific Discovery and Learning, was held at the Rayburn house Office Building on March 24th. Don Sweeney and Chuck Claver traveled to Washington, DC to present at the event and also meet with several congressional staffers. They described LSST’s innovative science, data management, and education and public outreach (EPO) programs and discussed the decadal review process in which the astronomical community prioritizes activities for the decade ahead. At the CNSF event and office visits, Claver and Sweeney talked with staffers over the course of eight action packed hours. Read More

Data Management Boundary Meeting Defines Science Needs

Tim Axelrod, Jeff Kantor and Anna Spitz

Data Management Boundary Meeting Attendees

Data Management Boundary Meeting Attendees

How do you manage 30 terabytes of data each night and enable cutting-edge science, including some that hasn’t even been defined yet? The LSST data management and science teams convened a meeting February 9-10, 2009 at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) to further refine just how to accomplish this enormous, paradigm-shifting task. LSST science requirements are the drivers for defining how data management is structured and carried out. “One of the challenges is that a lot of the science is unpredictable. There is a broad distribution of access and computation needs”, says LSST Director, Tony Tyson. Adding to this underlying challenge is the communication challenge: assembling a collaboration strategy to get scientists more involved in how data will be captured, analyzed, moved through, and archived in the LSST system. The UC-Davis meeting met these challenges by refining boundary definitions for products to create a software environment, which enables access to LSST data for diverse users, and by instituting steps to improve communication between the architects of the data management and the data users. Read More

 

LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:

Brookhaven National Laboratory; California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Columbia University; Google, Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology - Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Rutgers University; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California at Davis; University of California at Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt University

LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.

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